The FUTURE of COVID, Novak Djokovic visa CANCELLED, employees forced to work with COVID
In the final part of our 2 part series with all the recent covid updates, we look at some of the recent big stories concerning the pandemic
Workers
Many low-waged employees at countless major corporations have recently reported being forced to work despite being diagnosed with a disease that has killed over 5 million people globally in the last 2 years.
Primarily, this is because the federal government doesn’t force employees to pay their workers any period of sick leave. An example: you are a working class employee, making $15 an hour - which is below the living wage in most states - and you are barely surviving. You get covid. On top of the $320 figure we got to yesterday for testing, you need to get time off work. But, because sick leave isn’t in law, your company doesn’t provide it. Because of that, you miss 10 days of work. You work full-time, so 8 hours a day. You lose $1200 of pay, plus money for testing. You are $1520 out of pocket. If you make $15 an hour, you probably cannot afford that.
There are countless examples of this. One was covered by The Guardian, in this article, in which healthcare workers with covid symptoms were forced to work by the hospitals that employ them. They faced losing their jobs if they didn’t.
Just think about that. Do you want your Doctor or Nurse treating you with hands covered in covid? Are you comfortable with going to get your broken leg attended to with covid on the side? Do you want to get this disease as you give birth? I wouldn’t want any of those (I mean, one of them isn’t applicable to me, but the point stands).
This, of course, does not just apply to healthcare workers. Just about everyone who can be described as working class or barely middle class who has had COVID symptoms has probably faced a similar dilemma.
There is a very simple solution here. Join the rest of the world in forcing businesses to offer their employees paid sick leave, family leave and vacation time. Every other developed country has done this. Ethiopia has paid sick leave. The Taliban’s Afghanistan has paid sick leave. Think about that. The Taliban, under economic siege, are more humanist in terms of sick leave from work than the richest country in the world. That is really shit.
Novak Djokovic
Just for those who have zero interest in tennis, let me just explain quickly who Novak Djokovic is. He is one of the greatest tennis players ever. He has won 20 majors, which is the joint most in the open era, alongside Roger Federer (legend) and Rafael Nadal (almost as much of a legend).
At the Australian Open, he is at his best. He has won it 9 times, including the last 3 in a row. If he were to win this tournament, he is probably going to end up winning more majors than either Rafa or Roger, and he’d go down as the greatest tennis players ever. This years Aussie Open was his greatest opportunity to go above those two.
Djokovic is also reported to have a series of very strange beliefs, many of which fly straight in the face of science.
One of his strange beliefs is that he is gluten intolerant, and the way in which he came to believe that. As the BBC reports, “In his book Serve to Win, Djokovic described how in 2010 he met with a nutritionist who asked him to hold a piece of bread in his left hand while he pressed down on his right arm. Djokovic claims he was much weaker while holding the bread, and cited this as evidence of gluten intolerance.” This is nonsensical.
Another thing he believes is that the COVID vaccines either don’t work or that there are dangerous side effects. Neither of those things are backed up by any peer-reviewed study.
For these reasons, he did not get vaccinated. Now, that is his prerogative, and I have no problem with that. I disagree with his decision, but it is up to him and him only whether or not he takes this medical treatment.
As he tried to get into Australia, he was detained at the border and informed that his visa was cancelled. He was under the impression that, because he had tested positive for the disease in the preceding 6 months, he would be able to get into the country due to his natural immunity. In a sane system, this would be the case. Lawyers for the Department of Home Affairs said that the advice that Djokovic received claiming that natural immunity would be enough was outdated.
Djokovic’s visa cancellation was then overturned by Judge Anthony Kelly, after he determined that Djokovic had done everything he could under the advice he had received to get into the country, and as a result had been granted a medical exemption from vaccination requirements. There also seemed to be some significant malpractice by the border officials, who stopped him from seeing his lawyers amid other problems.
However, that decision was then again overturned by immigration minister Alex Hawke, who, in a statement, said the following:
Today I exercised my power under section 133C(3) of the Migration Act to cancel the visa held by Mr Novak Djokovic on health and good order grounds, on the basis that it was in the public interest to do so.
This decision followed orders by the Federal Circuit and Family Court on 10 January 2022, quashing a prior cancellation decision on procedural fairness grounds.
In making this decision, I carefully considered information provided to me by the Department of Home Affairs, the Australian Border Force and Mr Djokovic.
The Morrison Government is firmly committed to protecting Australia’s borders, particularly in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.
I thank the officers of the Department of Home Affairs and the Australian Border Force who work every day to serve Australia’s interests in increasingly challenging operational environments.
It is important to note that this decision bans Djokovic from entering the country for three years. He cannot participate in his favourite tennis tournament probably for the rest of his career. Not only is this disastrous for his career, but it is also a problem as Australia’s standing on the world stage.
This decision was then upheld by Australia’s federal court unanimously.
Now, under the rules I would suggest that this was probably the right decision, and it is consistent with how they have treated regular people.
However, these rules are stupid. For some reason, they do not account for natural immunity, which is more effective than the vaccines is preventing infection, hospitalization and death. Braindead.
There is no reason for natural immunity not to count as part of vaccine mandates. It is as anti-science as you could ever get.
At this point, I’m opposed to these closed borders generally. The majority of people who want to travel to Australia either have been vaccinated or simply do not have the virus, and even if they do they have omicron, which is mild for most of the population.
Frankly, there is no real reason to keep borders closed at this point. Most people who want to come to that country are either vaccinated, have had covid in the past, don’t have covid or have omicron which will harm a small number of people proportionately, especially in the highly vaccinated country that is Australia.
The only reason that the borders are so closed is because Australia are attempting to achieve something similar to a nonsensical covid-zero goal. Aiming to have zero cases of a highly transmissible, globally-reaching pandemic that has infected at least 334 million people globally, more if we count all those who were infected with the virus but did not receive a test. I don’t know how many people that is, but I would guess that it as least a couple hundred million people. Whatever the number, it has infected a shitton of people worldwide, so it is stupid to think that they could keep it out of their country by keeping their borders shut to most people, including Novak Djokovic.
For the tennis star, the future doesn’t look good. He has already been banned from the nation of Australia for 3 years, and the French government recently passed a bill banning unvaccinated professionals from sporting events, meaning that he will be able to get into the country but not into the Roland Garros event.
Joe Biden also isn’t afraid to use his power to make the life difficult for the unvaccinated, as evidenced by his attempt to pass a vaccine-or-test mandate earlier this year, that was recently shut down by the Supreme Court. That could make the US Open impossible for him to participate in, just leaving him one major a year, that being Wimbledon (undoubtedly the best major of the year).
Now, of course, he could just get vaccinated, but we all know that that isn’t going to happen.
Future of COVID
We can only guess where the future of this pandemic lies. Even the best epidemiologists in the world have been wrong about most of their projections.
What I’m expecting is for COVID to morph into the common cold or the flu. In the next year or two there will be another variant even more transmissible than omicron, however it will be much milder, especially with the majority of people vaccinated. At that point, it will end up being similar to the flu or the common cold.
The last pandemic ended in a similar fashion. The Spanish flu of 1918 had a new variant that was more transmissible but much milder than previous ones, meaning that it was no longer a threat. In fact, influenza is merely a descendant of the H1N1 virus of 1918. I’m expecting that within the next couple of years COVID will suffer a similar fate. Omicron is part of the process towards such a variant.
Until such a time, however, we need to think about what policies we, globally, need to think about how we are going to handle this virus. The main question is whether we try to stop everyone getting the virus, or just the elderly & immuno-compromised, or even just go completely in a life-as-normal direction.
Now, many governments have taken the first option, which is why we have had lockdowns, vaccine mandates, closed borders, mask mandates and other such restrictions all over the world.
I don’t think there was ever any need for any of these policies - with the two exception of some mask mandates in some busy, indoor areas - and for perhaps 3 or 4 day snap lockdowns to help hospitals prepare. Covid-zero was never going to be properly achieved by any nation of any decent size.
However, they are especially stupid now. With the most mild variant thus far and with over half the world double-jabbed, now is the time that we begin to open life back up fully. Lockdowns, vaccine mandates, closed borders, masks in schools, restaurants, hotels, outdoors and other small areas should all become things of the past.
Ideally, not only would all those policies become things of the past, but the corporations that created the vaccines will lose the patent protections on their products, so that way more people have the chance to get vaccinated than currently do. Only about 12% of people in the continent of Africa are double-jabbed, primarily because their governments can’t afford to buy the vaccines. If we fix that problem, more and more people can gain 90% protection from hospitalization & death from this disease. That would be a victory for all of us, with the exception of the greedy Big Pharma corporations that make millions of dollars off these crucial medications.
Honestly, however, I think that a lot of governments are going to try to continue these policies. A whole lot of countries and regions of countries - Victoria in Australia is a prime example - are going to continue to push for authoritarian lockdown restrictions that have adverse human and economic consequences - the former obviously the more important of the two - on the whole population. There have been a higher number of suicides globally as a result of these lockdowns and covid restrictions, which is a catastrophe, and, of course, that is far from the only problem with lockdowns. I don’t see how any of us can be comfortable with the government having this much power over our lives. How can we be happy to let the government lock us all in our houses for however long they feel like, whenever they want? Unfortunately, I would suggest that it is likely that governments that have been comfortable with lockdowns repeatedly in the past will continue to implement them in the future.
The same goes for vaccine mandates. I am opposed to allowing the government to force us to take a medical treatment, even if that medical treatment is an overwhelmingly good one that definitely works. It is not a power I want them to have, at all.
Closed borders will probably continue for a long time to come, especially for the unvaccinated, even if they have natural immunity. At this point, as we understand what omicron is and the mildness of it, it’s time for us to open borders up to pre-pandemic levels.
Mask mandates are probably the most contentious part here, and the area in which I have the most internal debate with myself over the right policy. One thing I am sure of is that masks in schools is one of the stupidest things ever. As this study from the UK shows, there is no proof that masks in schools work. There is also no need for masks in restaurants. In restaurants with mask mandates, you have to enter with a mask, then take it off when you sit down - which is the period in which you are most likely to be infected - you don’t need a mask. Then as you stand up to leave you need the mask again. Logically deficient. Honestly, I only see need for masks in supermarkets, indoor malls and maybe religious gatherings/sporting events/concerts, as those are the places that just about everyone goes on a regular basis, and, in the case of the latter selection, people tend to be packed in quite tightly. At the same time, though, I am aware that in churches, sporting events and concerts, masks are a killjoy for the atmosphere, and most people who go to these events go for atmosphere-related reasons.
On a personal level, there is a lot that we can all do to help us with COVID. The first and foremost is to work on our personal health, especially our weight and fitness. As one study showed, otherwise-healthy obese people in the US were 113% more likely to end up in hospital than non-obese people, 74% more likely to end up in ICU and 48% more likely to die. I know that kicking obesity is incredibly difficult, and keeping weight off after losing it, is incredibly difficult. But we can all make an effort, be it not eating as much sugar or fast food, or going for a walk every day, we can all do a small thing for our own health to help us get through covid, and to be healthy in our lives anyways. It’s a win-win for you.
OK, that’s covid for you. Tell me below where you agree, disagree and are conflicted.